Garage vs SeaweedFS: which one to choose in 2026?
Both are open source alternatives to Amazon S3. We compare license, tech stack and features to help you decide which fits your team best.
| Garage | SeaweedFS | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Storage | Storage |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | — | 23k |
| Tech stack | Rust | Go |
| Replaces | Amazon S3 | Amazon S3 |
Garage
Distributed, S3-compatible object storage, an alternative to Amazon S3.
Pros
- Excellent for homelab clusters on modest hardware
Things to consider
- Cluster configuration has a bit more of a learning curve
SeaweedFS
Distributed storage for millions of files, an alternative to Amazon S3.
Pros
- Excellent performance with massive volumes of small files
Things to consider
- Less polished documentation than MinIO to get started
Key features
Garage
- 100% S3-compatible API
- Built for geo-distributed clusters
- Very low per-node resource usage
SeaweedFS
- Optimized for small files at scale
- Included S3 compatibility layer
- Configurable replication and erasure coding